For various reasons, a person may desire to keep his or her ability in a language a secret, or to misrepresent it. For example, a person may misrepresent that he was born and raised in the United States and speaks no Chinese, when he was really born and raised in China and speaks fluent Chinese. This problem is particularly important in the hiring of governmental employees with access to sensitive information.
There exist many techniques to test whether an individual who claims to speak fluent Chinese, for example, can really do so. However, there are no known techniques for accurately testing whether a person who claims to not speak fluent Chinese actually does speak fluent Chinese. For example, that person can simply pretend that he does not know the words too fluently, stutter, and claim he can not understand Chinese audio. Therefore, there is a need in the art for detecting false assertions about a lack of ability in a given language.
Further, the same issue exists with respect to writing, reading, comprehension, and other language skills beyond merely speaking. The following description is exemplary, but is intended to cover these other language skills as well.